Suse 10.3 – Xen in Vmware

When you try to install Suse 10.3 as a Xen server within VMware (I know!), don’t forget to change ownership/rights of the VMware network devices /dev/vmnet* in a way so that VMware can read and write from them (chmod a+rw /dev/vmnet* ). Otherwise there will be no promiscuous mode for that, which means neither tcpdump in the virtual machine nor bridged networking with the bridge-utils like Xen needs it. With a working Xen kernel, the virtual VMwar machine will seem to be without network connection.

Close VMware, stop the virtual machines, change permissions and restart VMware. That’ll solve the problem. What did cost most of my time was finding this out, since there obviously is no error message. Now I’m looking for a way to have the rights set correctly at boot time, since up to now the command above is necessary after each boot.